InnovationBlindness

We love to celebrate our world-envying innovation ecosystem, with centers of entrepreneurship, incubators, and accelerators in every major U.S. city and at many universities. That environment is supercharged by “tech” and the almost magical capabilities that decades of development and hundreds of billions of investments have given each of us, embodied in our iPhones.

“Visionary” leaders continue to expand (and command) our tech-centric world, along with the legions of programmers, App developers and Influencers, now mesmerizing minions of the faithful 16/7 head-bowed users ¹ . Unfortunately, I would argue, all that tech has constricted and refracted our sight, yielding severe myopia. Lacking corrective lenses for that blur, most don’t see in their surroundings where we are not innovating — and how that damages our nation and the climate.

01SECTION 01A view from above

I will use an unusual frame of reference that adjusts the focal point to clarify the misperceptions, objectifying it through science fiction as a metaphor — starting with the San Francisco Bay area. If an alien spaceship voyaged there and observed the workings and impact of Silicon Valley tech, here are a few revealing but simple observations they might make. Hovering above the city, they see cars crossing the many bridges that link over several bays, some driving sleek Tesla-branded automobiles. Many of those commuters work in tall multistory office buildings, such as the sleek Salesforce Tower, forming the skyline of a city shaping the world’s future.

Yet Teslas are based on a platform first commercialized over 125 years ago (when electric cars outnumbered gas!). The bridges are from archetypes that are centuries old. In fact, there hasn’t been a new bridge archetype built in the U.S. since the latter half of the 1800s. ² The Salesforce Tower is more refinement than radical departure from the first steel-framed “skyscraper,” conceived and engineered by William Jenny, and constructed in Chicago in 1885 (the Home Insurance Building). ³

It is not that history itself the aliens find most interesting. It is the disparate nature of technology development from the 19th century to the present. As they travel across the country, including to the U.S. financial hub, they observe many breakthroughs — even paradigm shifts — in the tech world. But most bridge and building construction they see as archaic, standing in sharp contrast. Here is what the aliens found when they examined that deep disparity.

02SECTION 02Two timelines, diverging

In the year the world’s first skyscraper was built (1885), William Borrough patented the mechanical adding machine. More accurate than the hand calculation most had relied on, it was widely adopted for commercial uses. Fast forward to 1931, when a young IBM introduced the “601 Multiplying Punch” — a leap forward able to multiply an 8-digit number by another 8-digit one in six seconds. That same year, construction of the 102-story Empire State Building, the tallest in the world, was completed. It took 13.5 months to construct ⁴ — 20 months in total from when planning began. Steel-framed, consuming 60,000 tons of it, the ESB remained the world’s tallest building for the next 40 years.

In 1973 the 1,457-foot, 108-story Sears (now Willis) Tower opened. The innovative bundled-tube design consumed 76,000 tons of steel, took three years to build, cost about $1 billion (in today’s dollars), and was the tallest building in the world for the next 25 years. Around the same time Hewlett-Packard introduced their first scientific electronic pocket calculator, the HP-35 — light-years ahead of IBM’s 601 punch calculator in speed, size, power and versatility, and at a fraction of the cost.

Jumping to 2026, the ubiquitous iPhone, with dozens of powerful features, has almost no points of reference when juxtaposed to the handheld calculators of 50-plus years ago. That can’t be said for the construction industry. In fact, in some ways, its performance is worse.

03SECTION 03The Empire State test

Using the 1931 Empire State Building as a point of comparison, and Chase Bank’s new skyscraper headquarters in New York, whose construction was just completed, the numbers are stark.

Let’s cut Chase Bank’s builders some slack. They had more site prep before construction could start, and had to meet stringent design codes, like seismic and wind (employing a 280-ton tuned mass damper ⁵ ). Labor and steel cost, in absolute terms, are also higher today than in 1931. But why such long construction timelines and the massively more expensive build, particularly given all the powerful labor- and cost-saving tech (the 61-story Salesforce Tower took 4 years to construct and cost twice as much as the 102-story Empire State Building)? It is not that there haven’t been design innovations; but they are refinements to what Chicago’s Fazlur Khan (SOM) profiled as the state of the art in 1973. ⁶ Amazingly, tall buildings are where the construction industry is the most innovative.

04SECTION 04Bridges built for a bygone era

It is not just buildings. A long-span bridge can devote 75% or more of its structural mass just to holding up its own dead load ⁷ — not the live load it is designed to support. That is wasteful and inefficient. The cost to construct new bridges, particularly medium and longer spans, is higher, typically much higher now. Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge is emblematic of that. The original was completed in 1977 and cost about $750 million in current dollars. Replacement of the collapsed Key Bridge was projected to cost $2 billion — now $4 billion, more than 5 times the original. And it will likely take 4–5 years for reconstruction, using the same methods as in 1977.

With 7,468 U.S. bridges at risk of progressive collapse from a single hit ⁸ , that is also a national security risk. The Key Bridge is not an outlier; it is representative of where the bridge construction industry is today. Despite material science and other technology advances, astoundingly we have not built a new bridge archetype since before the Wright Brothers invented their plane.

I have written about the multi-trillion-dollar AEC industry’s focus on employing more tech as the Holy Grail, along with refinements to existing methods and material science advances. ⁹ But where are the novel structural systems, or the funding sources to incentivize their development? The most cutting-edge building system, the diagrid (e.g. the Hearst Tower, NYC), was invented in 1896.

05SECTION 05Who isn’t asking the question?

What is missing are paradigm shifts, or even substantial breakthroughs. Just look at the structural efficiency of bridges built today (measured by live load to self-weight ratio). Often it is not much different than those built 50 or 75 years ago. ¹⁰ That is also true of much of building construction. Why? The aliens are baffled that so few seem to notice our dependence on “antique” platforms, or the lack of investment for innovation “leaps.” ¹¹ Other industries have had higher material and labor cost, but they have innovated and streamlined production — their products can be an order of magnitude better. Construction productivity, meanwhile, has declined over the last 20 years.

It is hard to find anyone asking — and not just the AEC “leaders,” but also philanthropists, climate advocates and U.S. government agencies — where are we failing at needed innovation? Here are several reasons.

• Government agencies follow political visions. No administration has conceived of novel structural systems, so there is no funding — NSF doesn’t even have a suitable category.
• Climate advocates are enamored with the old as new. ⁹
• Most foundations have shifted to a “country club” model where only “members” (past recipients) and “invited guests” (their network) are allowed to apply — yielding groupthink.

Is it fair to include journalists with the intellectual-poverty moniker? We are surrounded by economy-draining old and inefficient infrastructure, including the buildings we inhabit and bridges we drive over. If the problem definition doesn’t connect their mass to their impacts, it won’t engage our imagination.

Construction not only produces a large share of the world’s greenhouse gases, it also consumes nearly half of the earth’s natural resources ¹² , including much of the world’s forest. That has profound environmental consequences — on carbon sinks and fragile, dwindling biodiversity.

For “visionary” investors, it may be they are blinded by glare from their creations, and obsessed with the more than half a trillion dollars spent annually on A.I. Does earth have more intelligent life?